Institute for Energy Efficiency

[12] At the Institute's Emerging Technologies Review[13] event, speakers from across the industry and academia come together to discuss better efforts to battle carbon emissions.

IEE faculty members hold awards and honors from organizations including the National Academies of Engineering, Inventors, and Sciences; the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS); the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE); The Optical Society (OSA); the American Physical Society (APS); and the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

Aware of the need to create and promote energy efficient technologies and noticing a convergence of many energy-efficiency related research projects across the UCSB campus, College of Engineering Dean Matt Tirrell and UCSB Chancellor Henry T. Yang, together with a group of business leaders including Jeff Henley, Dan Burnham, Fred Steck, and John Marin in 2008 proposed the establishment of the Institute for Energy Efficiency.

For the first 10 years, the institute was organized into six Solution Groups, led by UCSB faculty members prominent in their fields: In 2019, IEE organized its research into three main thrusts: The Institute for Energy Efficiency is housed in Henley Hall,[22] a three-story 49,900 gross square foot building designed to house IEE's research activity and programs.

[23] As of November 2021, Henley Hall has been awarded the U.S. Green Building Council’s 2021 Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Platinum certification.